The present invention relates to a management method for storage areas of a storage device, and more particularly to a method of exclusively managing each of a plurality of already set storage areas.
The capacity of a storage device (hereinafter simply called a “storage”) is increasing more and more, such as a disk array device having a number of disks. For this reason, one server does not occupy one storage, but a plurality of servers share one storage by using a network dedicated for the storage, called a storage area network (SAN). SAN has the advantage that desired connections can be established between a plurality of servers and storages to share data. On the other hand, SAN has the disadvantage that the network configuration becomes complicated and operation management is difficult.
A method called a “storage pool management” has been devised as a method of facilitating management of storage areas of a large capacity storage connected to a complicated network. With this “storage pool management”, the storage area of a storage is called a “storage pool”, and the “storage pool” is collectively managed as a general area to allocate a necessary capacity of the storage requested from a user.
FIG. 12 is a diagram showing the structure of a conventional system for performing storage pool management. Reference numerals 101 and 102 represent storages, reference numerals 201 to 205 represent servers 1 to 5, reference numeral 301 represents a management console, and reference numeral 501 represents a SAN.
In the management console 301, reference numeral 311 represents a pool manager which is software for executing storage pool management.
In the server 20x (x=1−5, x is used hereinafter as a representative number), reference numeral 211 represents an OS. Reference numeral 29xrepresents pool access software for making a storage pool area accessible.
In a storage 1 (101), reference numerals 111 and 112 represent logical unit numbers (LUN) 1 and 2, and in a storage 2 (102), reference numeral 121 represents LUN 1. Reference numeral 130 represents a pool area which is collectively managed by the pool manager 311.
The pool area 130 is realized by forming beforehand a LUN for the pool area and then assigning this LUN to the pool area. Forming an LU and assigning LU to LUN is called forming LUN. The unit of a storage area called LU is also called a volume. When the pool area is to be expanded, LUN is newly formed which is registered to the pool area 130 by the pool manager 311.
The pool manager 311 generates a partition (191, . . . ) dedicated to each server x in the pool area 130. The pool manager 311 notifies partition setting information to the pool access software 29x of each server x so that partitions other than the partition dedicated to each server x cannot be recognized.